OTS calls for SROI evaluation reports
February 2008
The Office of the Third Sector is interested in identifying social enterprises or other third sector organisations that have carried out or are carrying out evaluations using Social Return on Investment.
The OTS is scoping the interest in and usage of Social Return on Investment (SROI) as an impact measurement tool. One stage in this process is to identify how many SROI evaluations have been carried out in the UK. If your organisation is using SROI or has completed an SROI report then the OTS would like to hear from you.
The OTS wants to review copies of actual evaluation reports; however, if the report is confidential they would still like to know that it has been completed or is underway. Further information is available from Kevin Robbie at the OTS (kevin.robbie@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk).
There are various ways of measuring SROI, and the most appropriate tools for the charity sector are still in development - from softer social accounting to the more hard-edged economic approaches which New Economics Foundation has been developing and which can be downloaded from their website. The NEF explains that SROI ‘is a process of understanding, measuring and reporting on the social, environmental and economic value that is being created by an organisation’ and that it ‘measures the value of the benefits relative to the costs of achieving those benefits’. However they do make the point that ‘SROI analysis should not be restricted to one number, which should be seen as a shorthand for expressing value. Rather, it presents a framework for exploring an organisations’s social impact, in which monetisation plays an important part but not an exclusive role.
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